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Topic: Modding the new Sky Ray S99 (Read 2086 times)

This light is one of the newer Sky Ray Kinds and although it's a nice host it's a terrible light to buy if you are not planning on modding it. It comes with fake Cree emitters with an ugly bluish tint. There is also no pill so the emitters are on a single thin slice of aluminum that is just hanging in mid air. Terrible. On the plus side it's a light that doesn't have any rings in the beam at all. It's build nice with good threads and has a little bigger head to fit the 9x emitters. Nice springs and you could even put a tailcap switch in if you wanted with the way the end cap is built.

The driver is really junk so the first thing I do is pull it out and set it on a hotplate so that all the parts fall off. This leaves the driver for use as a contact board. I take the emitters and aluminum thin MCPC and toss in in a box. (By the way these emitters seemed impervious to de-doming with gasoline).

Take the driver board now contact board and use a DMM to find the spots to solder a positive and negative wire. Solder those two wires to your driver of choice. I chose to build a Zenor mod FET DD ramping driver. This is then wired directly to the emitters the way you normally would. The new driver can then be potted and left to hang inside the empty cavity. If you don't want to pot it then just wrap it good with electrical tape.

Now this light also doesn't even have threads for a pill. It does however have a nice wide shelf for a pill to sit on. So what I did was ordered some 2inch copper discs from Speedy Metal. They were actually about 1/2 inch thick so they were too think to set in and still screw the bezel on. So I broke out a hacksaw and cut it in half. Then I took a sander and sanded the sides until they were basically mirror polished.

It's now about 3/16th thick and that is about all that will fit there and allow the head to screw on.

At this point I then mounted the 9 noctigons. Being a little too big for the light I filed them down to size and made sure to remove any burr that was under it from the filing. For emitters I chose 5x High CRI XM-L2 warm white and 4 XM-L2 Cool White. The combo is simply fantastic. It's a little bit rosy like the good nichia emitters but just a little cooler.

To mount this I then sanded the shelf itself down until it was also very smooth and used good thermal epoxy to keep it down. Heat transfer away from the emitters is now fantastic. It's as good as a full copper screw in pill that I was given for another SRK. Of course keep the epoxy layer as thin as possible.

The emitters are all wired in Parallel and you can't use too heavy of wire or the reflector will not sit down properly. I don't know if you can see from the picture but I set it up so all the positive wires are on the outside and all the negative wire on the inside. This makes it possible to wire the entire light without having to cross wires over top of each other. I did use heavier wire in one I made for another flashaholic and did get more lumens but I didn't think the beam was quite as nice as this one because the reflector would not sit down perfectly over the emitters. This light is about 6,000 lumens with decent batteries, the one with heavy wires hit 7,000.

One more thing that should be done is to remove the thin wire they have on the tailcap and replace it with a heavier one. I might also do spring mods but probably not.